Just the other week I replaced the hard drive in my laptop, which I alluded to in my previous blog post. I paid $69 on Amazon for a 500Gb hard drive.

In that same week browsing Amazon I saw a price I could not resist and paid $119 for a 3Tb external hard drive.

Three Terabytes. THREE TERABYTES! In the course of the past few years I think I paid $149 first for a 1TB drive, and then about the same amount for a 2TB drive.

And now, for less than that I just doubled the amount of memory in my home network.

Like a miser starting at his bank balance I find myself looking at my system screen and the reams of free space on the various drives with a sly smile.

Most of my childish glee at cheap memory stems from being old enough to have watched memory prices fall. This is an obsession that dates back to when my parents bought a 20Mb hard drive for the family PC, back around 1989 or so.

It’s probably genetic. My late grandfather was always fond of pointing out how much hardware prices have gone up over the years. He could (and did!) tell you what he paid for a hammer in 1939, and how much the lumber, screws and nails cost for the garage he built behind his house in 1947.

So look at it this way, my blogs are maintaining a family tradition.

I remember when Sony’s first 64Mb Memory Stick came out, with an msrp of $299.99.

I also remember a regular customer a few years later, when they were only $89.99 who would come in every week and buy another 64Mb Memory Stick or two for his Sony Cybershot camera.

When the 128Mb Memory Sticks came out (At $129.99) he switched to those; buying another one every week or so.

Eventually, I said to him “You know, you can copy your image files to your PC, erase your Memory Stick, and just keep using the same one, right?”

He looked at me as if I was an idiot.

“I know that!” He huffed, defensively, but he insisted that he also kept the image files on his Memory Sticks and kept them in a box, the same way people used to do with developed negatives and photo slides.

So he kept buying more Memory Sticks, week after week.

I wonder if he still has them?